Homage is clearly the point here, and
it is a beautiful homage: This review
could perhaps be the words “Don’t
worry, it plays fine” followed by 100
screenshots of Streets of Rage 4’s
characters and stages, and you’d
get the point.
The best reason to
play this game is to see
the fluid attack
animations for each
character, to be
distracted by one
gorgeous backdrop
after another, to
scrutinize each stage
for easter eggs and cute little details.
The second best reason is to revel in
the music, which will be on my
shortlist for soundtrack of the year. It
retains the series’ synthy vibe while
incorporating bits of funk and rock
and even dubstep.
I did enjoy the punching and the
kicking quite a bit, too, thanks to that
great animation and a more
complicated set of attacks than the
old games. These moves do a great
job of expanding on the actions you
can take at any given moment, and
each character plays quite differently.Even if it’s not trying to innovate,
Streets of Rage 4 is delightfully playful
with its stage designs and some little
flourishes here and there. In
Chinatown, you fight your way
through a huge stream of enemies
using polearms to keep
your distance. In
another level, you fight
your way down a
hallway reminiscent of
Oldboy; there’s a sauna
with a wet floor that
you and enemies both
go slipping and sliding
across. In a genre this
straightforward, even something as
simple as a slippery floor can make a
stage stand out.RAGE APPROPRIATE
There are a bunch of difficulty levels
and assist options to help you out at
the expense of your score. The
scoring system often left me
frustrated, because it’s how you
unlock characters and also how you
earn crucial extra lives during stages,
but even after several hours I wasn’t
completely clear on how it worked.
There’s a combo meter for gettinghits on enemies in rapid succession,
but if you get hit mid-combo you lose
all the points you were accruing.
Except sometimes I’d get hit and
keep the points. It wasn’t obvious
what was happening either way.
Even after a few hours with
Streets of Rage 4, I didn’t feel like I
had a good sense of how to
significantly raise my score. It’s fine
for a scoring system to judge you
harshly and demand excellence, but
that only works when a game teaches
you how to get better. That’s one area
where Streets of Rage 4 really
could’ve modernized. It’s also just as
frustrating today as it was 30 years
ago to scroll a vital healing item off
screen, with no option to go back.
Would you please just let me grab the
damn roast chicken!
Four-player co-op is a nice option
and locally it’s smooth as butter, but
online, playing with another PC
Gamer editor close to me in
California, the game was sometimes
sluggish. It was still playable, but I
could immediately spot the
difference. Based on my experience
I’d wouldn’t expect it to reliably
match the fluidity of offline play.
The limitations of ’90s-era design
stand out more when you’re playing
Streets of Rage 4 solo. I had a blast in
the more chaotic co-op playing with
my roommate on the couch. I know
there will be people who delight in S
ranking every level on the hardest
difficulty, but for me, these games are
at their best when you’re mashing
buttons a lot and thinking a little.
Co-op on the hard difficulty
setting gave me exactly that: a three
to four hour tour through some
beautiful, creative stages, and a
soundtrack that will still rule when
the next Streets of Rage comes out,
even if that takes another 25 years.NEED TO KNOW
WHAT IS IT?
Punching guys to sick
synth beats
EXPECT TO PAY
$25
DEVELOPER
Dotemu, Lizardcube,
Guard Crush
PUBLISHER
Dotemu
REVIEWED ON
GTX 980, Intel
i7-6700K, 16GB RAM
MULTIPLAYER
Up to 4 player co-op
LINK
streets4rage.com76
Streets of Rage 4 doesn’t
do much to innovate, but
it’s a beautiful brawler
with just enough depth to
stay engaging.VERDICTWou ld you
please just let
me grab the
damn roast
chicken!S
treets of Rage is so deeply ’90s, its main characters are named
Axel and Blaze, the kinds of names that made 12-year-olds
whisper “whoa, cool”. Streets of Rage 4 is the game I imagine
those kids creating if they grew up to be talented videogame
developers, and wanted to remake the thing they played as kids.
Streets of Rage 4 does not try to reinvent the basics—you walk to the right,
you punch guys; sometimes, for a change of pace, you throw them.KNUCKLE UP
With luscious hand-drawn animations and creative stages, STREETS OF RAGE 4
packs a powerful punch. By Wes Fenlon
GUESS THAT THUG Fun and games on the mean streets
Streets of Rage has
a history of...
interesting names
for its bad guys.
Streets of Rage 4
brings many of
them back. Can
you match the right
name with each of
these portraits?Abadede
Diamond
Dylan
Feroccio
Galsia
Gold
Murphy
Nora
Raven
Soya- Nora, 2. Murphy, 3. Diamond, 4. Soya, 5. Abadede, 6. Gold, 7. Dylan, 8. Feroccio, 9. Galsia, 10. RavenAnswers:
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REVIEW